In my column last week, I looked at how many recruits UF might be able to sign in the 2021 class. Because of things that have happened in recent classes, I included some things that I wouldn’t have even one year ago.
Florida is harder to get into than many large, public universities are. It’s not in the class of schools whose recruiting is significantly hampered by academic requirements like Vandy or Stanford are, but it’s not like Kansas State where it almost doesn’t have to look at grades and test scores.
Or, more pertinently, Mississippi State. MSU is exactly the sort of four-year college that someone who couldn’t get into UF might go to instead. I suspect nine years in Starkville materially changed Dan Mullen’s views on what the recruiting racket would term “academic risk” players because Florida’s recruiting has materially changed with him in charge.
Past Florida coaches almost never had players fail to qualify. That’s not to say they didn’t sign players on the borderline of getting into school, but those were always carefully calculated risks that nearly always went one way.
Urban Meyer never had a signee fail to qualify. Neither did Will Muschamp. One player in Jim McElwain’s transitional 2015 class didn’t qualify, but that was it for his tenure.
And then in Mullen’s 2019 class, three players didn’t make it in. As I said: recruiting materially changed.
They were not completely random selections. Diwun Black committed to Mullen at Mississippi State and moved from Mississippi to a high school in Kissimmee for his senior year of high school to get closer to the program. Deyavie Hammond was one of three signees that year from Lakeland, a classic Florida pipeline school. Arjei Henderson was a mid 4-star receiver in a class that both needed wideouts and lacked a blue chip prospect.
Florida ended up releasing Henderson from his letter of intent, and he enrolled at FCS Jacksonville State. Black and Hammond, however, became Florida’s first real attempts at executing a sign-and-place since Reggie Nelson back in the Ron Zook era.
Sign-and-place is when a program signs a player who either is a strong academic risk or flat-out won’t make it into school with the intention of getting him after he completes a year or two of JUCO. The signing school is hoping to build up goodwill through the high school recruiting process, and often the coaches try to steer the prospect towards a friendly JUCO.
It’s a different kind of deal at Florida than at Mississippi State. A sign-and-place at MSU probably wasn’t going to get into any four-year college. A sign-and-place at UF may have been able to, though, and we saw that last year with Henderson. Whereas Black and Hammond were willing to go through a couple of years of junior college to get the chance to be Gators on the other side, Henderson asked for and got his release to enroll elsewhere right away.
It has since happened again, as 2020 signee Johnnie Brown announced almost a month ago that he is on his way to a JUCO. Black and Hammond are currently verbal commits in the ’21 Florida class; Brown might end up one in the ’22 class.
So the two new things I did in that column were: 1) include a caveat that Florida might oversign (sign above the 85-man cap) due to one or more sign-and-place situations, and 2) not pass judgment on sign-and-place as a practice.
The latter shouldn’t have been new, but it is. I will admit that until fairly recently, I lookws down on schools routinely signing players who fell on the wrong side of the edge of qualifying.
It wasn’t an entirely unfounded view, as there’s a way to do it abusively. Houston Nutt’s (in)famous 37-member recruiting class in 2009 came as a part of a deliberate strategy to game the JUCO system. When challenged on the size of his class, he joked that there wasn’t a rule saying he couldn’t sign 80 and confessed that seven or eight of those players were never close to qualifying.
A place like Ole Miss doesn’t have room for seven or eight JUCO players in a class, so Nutt knew some number of those players were never going to end up in Oxford. He was trying to turn Mississippi’s JUCOs into an MLB-style farm system, where he could send recruits and find out which ones could or couldn’t play and could or couldn’t make it in the classroom. That I did and still do have a problem with.
As far as I can tell, Mullen isn’t doing that. It could just be motivated reasoning for me to say that, but Black and Hammond being committed to Florida is a sign that Mullen wasn’t engaging in the crass kind of sign-and-place that Nutt did. He signed them because he wants them in his program, and he’s sticking with them through the years-long JUCO process to get them to Gainesville.
Mullen can’t come out and say that he’s more willing to take academic risks with his classes than his predecessors. It doesn’t jibe with his or the university’s selling of UF as a top ten public institution. But either he’s significantly worse at judging academic risks than those past Gator coaches or he’s more comfortable with sign-and-place than they were.
The latter seems more likely to me. Nutt’s excesses aside, it’s a fact of life for SEC coaches in Mississippi. At MSU Mullen signed plenty of guys who didn’t qualify, some of whom ended up in Starkville after a year or two of junior college. Do that for nearly a decade and it’ll change your perspective on things. Mullen was matter-of-fact at 2019 SEC Media Days about how some guys who want to be Gators may have to go to junior college first in order to qualify, so he’s not ashamed of signing players like Black or Hammond.
With Florida going from a place where basically everyone qualifies to one where the head coach is willing to sign-and-place, it means it might be worth it to change the way we evaluate the recruiting classes. If Mullen is, if not happy, at least sanguine about some signees ending up at JUCO, you might want to get there too. It’s happened in each of the last two classes. If a 2021 high school recruit doesn’t qualify, how will you react?
Mullen will react by continuing to treat him like a human being and try to have a relationship with the player. He won’t look down on the guy for not getting into school, which could have a lot of contributing factors that aren’t the guy’s fault. It appears the days of every Florida recruit qualifying every year are over, so it might be time to stop expecting it and broaden our perspectives.